An integrated circuit is susceptible to an electrostatic discharge (ESD). A sudden discharge from some external device or phenomenon can cause a failure in the integrated circuit (IC). The risk is particularly high for devices that are not grounded such as portable and handheld devices. The ability of a device to survive an ESD may be increased by protecting certain components (component-level ESD protection) and by protecting the overall system (system-level ESD protection). The system level ESD protection may consider the behavior of an electronic device including external pins, pins being directly accessible, and also internal integrated components or pins, since a damaging current pulse may reach an ESD sensitive region or pin within the electronic device. To find and resolve ESD failures, testing is used to make a more robust component or system design and to understand and consider the effects of ESD failures. Manufacturing and development may be adjusted using the results.
ESD tests are a part of electronic system qualification. In order to pass these tests, electronic systems are tested repeatedly to try and determine the source of ESD failures. Much of the current remedies to failures are applied using iterative trial and error steps because it is difficult to determine the exact failure mechanism and the stress path in the system. Many of the test failures are so-called soft failures in which the system enters an invalid state after an ESD stress. The invalid state will require the user to power down and restart the system in most cases. This is a time consuming process when trying to stress a system during test. Discovering and fixing ESD problems especially those that cause a soft failure in an empirical manner is time consuming and odd costs even to the extent of delaying product launches.